"With the letters of the alphabet you can write any word that is known," said Professor Ron Tappy as he concluded his presentation Wednesday night for the 51st Annual Lecture of the Madison Biblical Archaeology Society and the University of Wisconsin Department of Hebew and Semitic Studies. "The alphabet represents infinity. From A to Z represents everything that is known."
Tappy, an archaeologist and professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, presented the story of the 2005 discovery of the Zeitah inscription. The inscription shows the letters of the Hebrew alphabet at a key stage in the development of Hebrew from the Phoenician (Canaanite) alphabet, which was then picked up by the Greeks and Romans. "The letters and words you use are direct descendants of this inscription," he said, of the 3,000-year old inscription.
The alphabet was incised in a stone that was found in the wall of an early Iron Age building excavated at Tel Zeitah, which Tappy said was a border community located half way between the Philistine city of Gath and the Judahite city of Lachish in the time of King Solomon.
The inscribed stone was discovered on the final day of the 2005 excavation. Tappy said that he wasn’t very excited when one of his supervisors told him that a worker thought they had noticed an inscription on a stone because he knew they were working in a tenth century B.C. area and 10th century inscriptions are exceedingly rare. In fact the only other known inscription from the tenth century B.C. in Israel was found about 100 years ago at Tel Gezer. It’s known as the Gezer calendar and Tappy says epigraphers have dated his inscription slightly earlier than the Gezer calendar. So the Zeitah inscription is the oldest known inscription in the Hebrew language.
"I was floored," he said, when he bent over the stone and immediately recognized the letters of the ancient Hebrew script. He immediately tried to read words but couldn’t because the inscription was not made up of words.
"The tenth century is a very active time in the development of the alphabet," Tappy said, adding to the significance of this discovery. Even though the inscription is an abcedary, the letters in order one after another, the letters in this inscription are not exactly in the right order. Eight of the letters are in transposed pairs. Two of the transpositions are known from other ancient texts, the other two are not.
Why would an alphabet be inscribed in a stone, placed in a wall at a comfortable viewing level, in a remote border town of the kingdom of Solomon? Tappy said some scholars have suggested that scribes were taught in the room and it had an instructional purpose. However, he believes that the letters were not incised deeply enough to be easily seen in the dark inner room in which they were found. An alternative explanation could be that the letters had a magical meaning to the inhabitants of the building.
Whatever its significance, Tappy believes there is much more to be learned by further excavations at Tel Zeitah, including new insights into the archaeologically controversial 10th century B.C., which has traditionally been connected to the reigns of King David and King Solomon, but which some archaeologists now dispute. Excavations resume in just over one month, June 9, 2007.
An interview with Professor Ron Tappy will be featured this weekend on The Book & The Spade radio program at 11:16 on Sunday morning on Madison radio station WNWC AM 1190. The program can also be accessed online at http://www.radioscribe.com/bknspade.htm.